Burberry Data Platform Architect

About Burberry

Burberry Limited, a quintessentially British luxury fashion house, is renowned for its innovative designs and commitment to quality. As part of the global luxury conglomerate, Burberry offers a dynamic and inclusive work environment where creativity and excellence are at the forefront. The company is dedicated to fostering a culture that encourages diversity and sustainability, making it a leader in the luxury industry.

Role & Responsibilities

• Design and maintain the enterprise data platform’s technical architecture, including compute and storage design, ingestion frameworks, access control, performance tuning, and capacity planning.
• Define and maintain architectural standards and guardrails covering naming conventions, environment management, deployment pipelines, partitioning strategies, and cost-optimisation patterns.
• Own platform cost modelling and FinOps governance, define cost-allocation patterns, and identify optimisation opportunities.
• Align with the Data Senior Solution Architect and Data Solution Architects to ensure consistency with enterprise data architecture and models.
• Translate architectural direction into practical engineering guidance for Data Platform Engineers and Data Engineers, enabling implementation within defined standards without bespoke architectural intervention for standard use cases.
• Design data ingestion architecture for batch, micro-batch, and streaming, with clear system-to-system integration boundaries.
• Define architecture for the semantic layer and self-service analytics infrastructure.
• Advise data squads on complex data products and support Data Product Managers and Data Engineers where architectural complexity requires it.
• Ensure architecture supports emerging requirements, including agentic AI data infrastructure, MLOps productionisation, and advanced analytics.
• Collaborate with the Senior Manager, Data Platform Engineering, to align platform operations with target architecture, assess feasibility, and translate architectural decisions into implementable guidance.
• Collaborate with the Senior Manager, Data Engineering, to ensure data engineering work follows defined patterns and standards.
• Own the data platform roadmap from an architectural perspective, including the SAP BW transition or retirement path, Databricks maturation, and Datasphere integration-layer decisions.
• Contribute to enterprise architecture governance forums, representing data platform considerations in broader technology decisions.
• Provide architectural input to vendor and tooling decisions, evaluate technology options, and recommend platform evolution.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of design decisions, patterns, standards, and trade-offs.
• Define non-functional platform architecture standards for resilience, backup and restore, disaster recovery, observability, service levels, auditability, and operational readiness.
• Define platform security and privacy architecture with Cyber Security and Data Governance, including PII handling, access recertification, audit logging, and retention patterns.
• Establish architecture decision records, exception and waiver processes, and design scorecards so deviations from platform standards are visible, time-bound, and governed.
• Maintain platform adoption, performance, cost, and standards-compliance metrics to guide roadmap priorities and architecture governance decisions.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in Databricks (Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, Spark, Databricks SQL) or equivalent Lakehouse platforms, including administration, cost management, and performance optimisation.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture principles and cost models, with practical experience in CI/CD pipelines and environment strategies.
• Proven implementation of data security, including encryption, RBAC, column- and row-level security, and data masking.
• Strong understanding of ingestion and pipeline architecture patterns for diverse source systems.
• Experience with SAP data landscapes (BW, Datasphere, S/4HANA data flows) is highly desirable.
• Experience defining architectural standards and patterns for engineering teams, and comfort setting direction without hands-on delivery.
• Experience working within a centralised architecture function that engages flexibly with delivery squads.
• Ability to communicate architectural decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to thrive in evolving environments, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term strategy.
• Experience establishing architectural authority in environments transitioning from outsourced to in-house ownership is beneficial.
• Experience in Retail, Luxury, or Consumer goods industries is beneficial.
• Experience defining non-functional requirements and architecture patterns for enterprise-grade resilience, observability, disaster recovery, data lifecycle management, and operational readiness.
• Experience using architecture decision records, design authorities, exception management, and measurable standards adoption to embed architectural governance without slowing delivery.
• Based in the Central London office four days a week.

Skills

Experience

7–10+ years in data platform architecture, data engineering, or cloud data infrastructure.

Culture

Burberry fosters a creative and inclusive workplace culture that values diversity and sustainability. The company is committed to being a force for good, driving industry change and championing community engagement.

About Cerulean

Cerulean is the definitive career portal for the global luxury industry. We match exceptional professionals with exclusive opportunities at the world's most prestigious brands. From haute couture and fine watchmaking to prestige beauty, hospitality, and boutique retail, Cerulean centralises luxury employment to help you find the career for which you were destined.